On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 08:44:27AM -0600, Chad Walstrom wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 08:54:10PM -0800, Marc Singer wrote:
> > But let me see if I can paraphrase this: the non-free continues to be
> > archived on Debian servers but only DDs and authorized 3rd parties
> > will be able to access the non-free portion of the archve.
> >
> > If this is so, how do you believe a non-DD access non-free over the
> > Internet?
>
> He's proposing to have Debian's archives as the Master site for packages
> and the 3rd Party archives as the Slave sites. Changes happen on Debian
> but packages are only available by adding lines to your sources.list.
I can see two ways that this might be used. Either,
A) non-free.debian.org becomes a round-robin of 3rd party archive servers
that deliver all non-free packages, or
B) users users of non-free may have to add archive entries for
several different non-free servers.
deb http://non-free.acme.org ./
deb http://non-free.cogswell.org ./
In the case of A, Debian still must retain storage for all of the
non-packages, but users of non-free no longer get them from Debian
servers. So we're enrolling a group of 3rd parties to pay some of the
bandwidth costs.
In B, we're putting the burden of locating non-free package source
onto end users. In this case, I'm not sure why Debian is involved in
non-free at all.
I'm not getting where the win is. How does this plan change the
status of non-free?